Terror, media coverage link

Justin Lewis, Guardian News Service, Penarth, Wales

The millennium may not be very old, but there's no doubt which news story has dominated it thus far. Since the attacks on the twin towers on Sept. 11, 2001, terrorism has remained at the top of the news agenda.

Whether it is terrorist incidents, arrests, warnings from politicians or coverage of the actions carried out in the name of the "war on terror", we have seen more sustained coverage of the issue than at any other time in the modern era.

This is true even if we exclude the peak year of 2001. Since January 2002 in the UK, the London-based Times, Financial Times, Guardian, Mail and Mirror national dailies, have, between them, run an average of 400 stories about international terrorism every year. And the trend is upward, not downward.

Conventional wisdom -- informed by a steady stream of political rhetoric -- says that this is a response to the increasing risk posed by global terrorism since the attack on the twin towers.

Indeed, the British government's recent leaflet advising citizens what to do in the event of an attack -- together with a succession of warnings from the U.S. government -- imply the risk has reached unprecedented levels. And yet what is strikingly absent from both public discussion or news coverage is that there is little concrete evidence to support this view.

The U.S. government's own figures on international terrorism -- which it defines as the targeting of non-combatants or property by non-state agents and includes the actions of groups like the IRA and Eta -- suggests that the most active period of international terrorist activity was the mid-1980s. With occasional blips -- such as 1991 and 1999 to 2001 -- the annual number of terrorist attacks has been in general decline since then.

The evidence suggests that the attack on Sept. 11 was not the dawn of a new era of global terrorism, but a devastating one-off. Indeed, the years since then have seen fewer incidents per year than at any time in the last 20 years. The recent annual rate is only a third of the level reached between 1985 and 1988.

But surely the attacks in the U.S., Bali and Madrid show that the scale of terrorist attacks has escalated, even if there are fewer of them? Well, again, the figures tell a different story.

In terms of the number of casualties of international terrorism from 1998 to 2003, the peak year was not 2001, as most people might assume.

Despite the 4,465 casualties on Sept. 11 (which alone accounted for 77 percent of casualties that year) there were more victims from international terrorist attacks three years earlier, in 1998.

The fact that 80 percent of the casualties that year were in Africa might partly explain (though by no means excuse) the lack of political and media interest. But this explanation only goes so far: After all, many of the 1998 incidents involved attacks by al-Qaeda on U.S. targets, and there were also a comparatively high number of casualties (405) that year in western Europe.

Indeed, a closer look at the last 20 years of media coverage of international terrorism reveals that there is little relation between the number of international terrorist incidents in any given year and the use of the term in the press.

But while the U.S. data shows an increase in the number of terrorist attacks in 1987, news coverage that year dropped significantly, to less than a quarter of the 1986 level.

But the biggest mismatch between the coverage of terrorism and terrorist incidents is, without doubt, the period from 2002 to the present day. News coverage is at its highest-ever sustained level, while there have been fewer terrorist attacks than at any time in the last two decades.

How to explain this discrepancy? Well, unfortunately, it's not unusual to see media coverage bear little relation to actual levels of risk. Media research on agenda-setting shows that -- whether the topic is crime, drugs, war or the environment -- there is often little relation between the volume of coverage and real-world trends.

In many instances, what the media are responding to is not an increase in the problem but an increase of political rhetoric. Both the war on drugs and the war on terror boosted media coverage which, in turn, justified a series of political initiatives.

This, combined with the U.S.-centric nature of British news media, meant that the idea that "the world changed" on Sept. 11 became a self- fulfilling prophecy. So, just as the war on drugs in the U.S. in the late 1980s led to a massive increase in news coverage about the issue -- while drug use remained fairly static in the UK -- so the war on terror has made every act, threat or worry about terrorism far more newsworthy than hitherto.

The writer is professor of communication at the Cardiff School of Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies in Wales.